Escorting the Billionaire by Leigh James
Audrey
I was sittingin the common room at New Horizons, watching dust motes fly through the early morning light. Tommy was drinking orange juice and reading a graphic novel. He’d been happy to see me, and now we were just sitting together, both comfortably lost in the silence—me in my thoughts, him in his novel.
James had broken my heart. I had given myself to him last night. For the first time in quite possibly forever, I hadn’t held anything back. I was with him because I’d wanted him. And when he took me, every single cell in my body told me it was right. That I belonged to him.
I was his escort. His hired plaything. But there was something else going on between us. Something real that you couldn’t pay for or pretend.
I’d thought he felt it, too.
So. Fucking. Stupid.
Tommy reached over and patted my shoulder. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I lied. He watched me for a second and then went back to his book. I went back to my study of the dust motes. I loved Tommy. He was the one person who loved me and now I was sure, the one person in the world I could trust.
And now I didn't know how I was going to be able to keep him safe.
“Elena, I’m sorry,” I said, fighting back tears. I paced back and forth inside my apartment. “I told you, I don’t know why he did it.”
“He must have had a reason to fire you two days before the wedding,” she wailed. I held the phone back from my ear and winced.
I fucked his brains out, and then he told me I was fired,I wanted to say. That was the truth.
I was his escort, and he hadn’t wanted to fuck me.
Then he finally did.
Then he fired me.
It. Made. No. Sense.
“I’m sure you can keep the deposit,” I said, trying to be upbeat. James had paid her one hundred thousand dollars, cash, up front. “That’s decent payment for one week’s worth of work.”
“I was pretty interested in the other half, too,” she said.
“Maybe you could offer him one of the other girls,” I said over a large lump forming in my throat. “Someone more to his liking.”
“I thought he liked you,” she said.
“I thought he did, too,” I said, and I could feel the tears about to come. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop them.
Elena sighed again. “I’ll call him now.”
“Elena—one more thing,” I said. My stomach flipped nervously; I didn’t want her to be any angrier with me than she already was.
“What?” she asked.
“I left all the clothes and the jewelry over there,” I said, the words tumbling out on top of each other. “I had to leave quickly and I just… did. I left. Without taking them.” It was thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, shoes, bags, and jewelry. A lot of it was on loan from a luxury goods company. Elena was going to kill me.
I took a deep breath. “And I sort of told him to go fuck himself. So he might be a little angry.”
The silence on the other end of the line was deafening.
“Dre,” she said finally. Her voice was flat.
“What?” I asked, bracing for it.
“You’re fired.”
Fired twice in one day, just when I thought things were finally turning around.
I should have known better. In my twenty-two years, things had never turned around for me. I curled myself up into a ball on my futon, watching as the sun came up over the sky. I hate the sun, I thought, and I did. I hated the sun, the sky, my futon, and James Preston. Not necessarily in that order.
I had no idea what I was going to do now. Without Elena’s assignments, it would be back to trolling for dates online. Or parking my ass on a street corner, trying to flag down Johns. Or waitressing.
Probably, it was going to be a combination of all of these. But none of it would be enough to keep up with Tommy’s rent. I couldn’t even bear the thought. Before he’d moved in there, he’d lived with my mother. It was a bad situation. My mother was, at best, a drunk. At her worst, she was an irresponsible, abusive user. She’d almost set their apartment on fire three times over the last couple of years by passing out with a lit cigarette in her hand. It wasn’t safe for Tommy there. She never bought him the food he liked or took him to the library. And then there was the string of dirty men she brought home.
I’d tried to move him in with me but I couldn’t do it and work. He needed someone to watch him, to take care of him. Once he’d wandered off and once he’d burned himself trying to make a grilled cheese. New Horizons was the right place for him; it was the happiest he’d ever been.
I needed to help him, and now I couldn’t help him.
I let the tears come then, hot and ugly. And then just as quickly as they’d come, they stopped. Winners never quit and quitters never win, I told myself, wiping my eyes roughly. I’d read that quote somewhere, and I often repeated it to myself, even though my definition of “winning” was probably wildly different from most people’s.
I made myself sit up—I wasn’t any good to anyone if I was just sitting here and wallowing. I’d found a way to keep Tommy safe this long, I reasoned. I could still do it.
I could do it because I had to do it.
I got up and washed my face. I had the idea of going to the library; they had computers and Internet access. I could look for a job online. Part of me wondered whether I’d be able to google “escort services” or “exotic dancer positions” at the public library, but it was better than sitting here, cursing James Preston for firing me and sniffling into my T-shirt.
The phone rang as I was getting dressed. It was Elena. I took a deep breath before I answered it, preparing for the worst. Maybe James had taken my clothes and thrown them all out. Maybe he’d told her that I’d stolen from her, and that he was going to press charges. He wouldn’t do that, part of me wailed, but that was the same part that had believed he’d cared for me.
The common sense part of me bitch-slapped that part, hard, so she’d be quiet.
“Dre,” she said.
“Yes?” I asked, willing myself not to start crying all over again.
“You’re back in my good graces, young lady. I just got off the phone with James Preston—he says he wants you back. He made it clear that he only wants you. He also very generously offered to triple the fee for our trouble. Half is now coming directly to you, per his very specific instructions.”
I couldn’t breathe. I stood there, reeling for a bunch of different reasons. I wasn’t good at math, but this was pretty easy to figure out—three hundred thousand dollars. Holy fucking shit.
“It appears you have nine lives, Dre. But only seven left.”
“What?” I spluttered, finally finding enough breath to talk. “What did he say, exactly?”
“Just what I told you. Oh—and one more thing,” Elena said.
She waited a beat.
“He said that this time, he wants to fuck you.”
